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Latin and the Romance language Family | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tritone Senior Member United States reflectionsinpo Joined 6120 days ago 246 posts - 385 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, French | Message 10 of 36 21 September 2009 at 1:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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Is latin truly a "romance" language?
The modern romance languages are so similar to each other, but yet so different from Latin, that it feels they should be categorized differently. Edited by tritone on 21 September 2009 at 1:21am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6122 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 11 of 36 21 September 2009 at 2:22am | IP Logged | |||||
Good point. I would like to hear some opinions of what it means to have "mastered" the Romance family. For example, I would consider myself to have obtained a degree of mastery, simply because my base of French and Spanish and intermediate Italian enable me, with no further study of any other Romance languages, to read basic Portuguese and Catalan as well as some of the smaller languages/dialects such as Corsican and Sardinian. I can also follow the Latin Vulgate (translation of the Bible into Latin) fairly well. What I am saying is that other Romance languages which I have never studied do not seem that "foreign" to me (except Romanian).
Latin is removed a bit in time from the Romance languages. Here is an interesting tree to get some perspective: 
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 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5847 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 36 21 September 2009 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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My vote: Somewhat important!
I learned Latin as my second foreign language at school and my main profit from this language is that I got a precise idea how grammar is structured at an early age of my life. To learn French, Italian and Spanish it wouldn't have been necessary for me to know Latin. The real usefulness of Latin is for me more the grammar insight than the Romance vocabulary. So having studied Latin many years ago helps me when learning Turkish, which is another language with a complex and logical grammar. As a conlusion it's not a necessity to know Latin, if you want to learn any Romance language(s) sucessfully. But for me it wasn't a waste of study input either, even if I profit from this language more indirectly. Fasulye 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6659 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 13 of 36 21 September 2009 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If your ultimate goal is to learn Modern English, would you learn Old English or Middle English first?
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| quendidil Diglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 6312 days ago 126 posts - 142 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 14 of 36 21 September 2009 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
If I spoke a language with T-V distinction I would learn Early Modern English first. I read somewhere about a Frenchman who actually learnt Classical Chinese before modern Mandarin in university; he ended up learning both languages faster than his peers who went the other way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5567 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 15 of 36 21 September 2009 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It depends on what you mean by "mastery" of the Romance language family. I doubt
there's a person on the planet who can speak every Romance language and dialect, so if that's the standard then it's impossible. If you ask me, I would call fluency in the five major Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Romanian) good enough to warrant the label "mastery", or at least look the other way if someone claimed it. Sure you could learn Latin too, and I'd give you credit for that, but I don't see it as any more necessary for "mastering" the Romance languages than learning Proto-Indo-European is. That said, I don't think it's really possible to fully "master" any language or language family in the sense of knowing everything about it. There is always more to be learned, so I'd be willing to be somewhat lenient for practicality's sake. If you have a passion for the languages, put in a lot of effort, and have skills to show for it, that's all that really matters, right? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 36 22 September 2009 at 10:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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The first part of this thread was focused on the practical benefits of learning Latin for someone who really just wants to learn the modern Romance language. And as several other members I don't see that it is terribly relevant in that respect.
The last couple of posts have focused on what it will say to have some kind of command over the whole Romance family, and that's quite another question. This must include not only Latin, but also the old forms of the present languages. But to what purpose? Unless you are employed as a professor in Romance philology - few people on this planet are - then it can just be something you have as a hobby, and as Levi says: you will never learn everything about the Romance languages. Just as you can learn Old French and Dalmatian and Aromanian and other peripheral languages and dialects for fun, you can learn Latin for fun. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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